Can
lying serve national interest?
By Daniel Schorr
The Christian Science Monitor
Fri Jan 27, 3:00 AM ET
One of the inherent powers of the president, apparently, is the right
to lie in the perceived national interest.
In 1960, President Eisenhower had the State Department announce that a
plane shot down over the Soviet Union was on a weather mission. He was
left red-faced when the Russians produced the U-2 spy plane and its CIA
pilot.
In 1962 President Kennedy cut short a trip to the West Coast and flew
back to Washington from Chicago, suffering, it was announced, from an
upper respiratory infection. The real reason for his hasty return was
newly acquired photographic evidence that the Russians were putting
nuclear missiles in Cuba - prompting the Cuban missile crisis.
In 1981, the Reagan White House condemned Israel for bombing the Osirak
nuclear facility outside Baghdad saying, "The unprecedented attack
would add to the tense situation in the Middle East." Left unsaid was
that the CIA director, William Casey, had visited Israel and agreed to
cooperate in the attack, using American-made planes and American
reconnaissance satellites to pinpoint the target.
So now, 25 years later, once again we face the introduction to the
nuclear waltz and the question of how far the administration will go in
keeping Americans posted on the gathering storm. What we have heard so
far leaves a lot to the imagination.
At a news conference last February President Bush said, "The notion
that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply
ridiculous." He paused, and then added, "and having said that, all
options are on the table."
Around the same time, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker magazine
that the United States was conducting secret reconnaissance flights
over Iran to identify nuclear installations. The Pentagon, as you might
expect, denied it.
More recently Vice President Dick Cheney said that Iran was operating
"a fairly robust nuclear program" and that Israel might decide to act
first if the United States and its allies failed to solve the problem
by diplomacy.
"No president should ever take a military option off the table," he
said.
So there you have it. Is the administration deceiving us about its true
intentions? Or maybe it doesn't know its intentions. Maybe there are
divided counsels within the administration. History tells us that a
president will dissemble and even lie for his own purposes. I don't
know how well the Bush administration is doing in keeping Iranian
President Ahmadinejad off balance. But it's doing a fine job keeping
the American public off balance.